HOW MANY REALLY DIED IN KOSOVO? 

Body Count So Far Doesn’t Support Charges Of ‘Genocide’

Date :11/17/1999
Author : Brian Mitchell
Copyright : Investor's Business Daily

The Trepca mines in Kosovo were alleged to hold 1,000 bodies of Albanians murdered by Serbs.
If the bodies weren’t just dumped down mine shafts, they were supposed to have been burnt or dissolved in acid in the mines’ smelter.
The New York Times said residents nearby reported an "unusual, pungent bittersweet smell, which they assumed to be burning bodies."
The Mirror of London wrote that the name Trepca would "live alongside those of Belsen, Auschwitz and Treblinka ... etched in the memories of those whose loved ones met a bestial end in true Nazi Final Solution fashion."
But no bodies were found at Trepca. No human remains at all, according to the International Criminal Tribunal on the Former Yugoslavia - the ICTY. And all of Kosovo has turned up far fewer bodies than expected.
The results have raised the question of whether Western officials deliberately exaggerated the suffering in Kosovo to justify intervention.
During the bombing, NATO officials reported as many as 225,000 Albanian men missing. After the bombing, officials said the Serbs had murdered 10,000 Albanians.
The ICTY now believes over 11,000 people, mostly Albanians, were killed in war crimes. But so far investigators have found the bodies of only 2,108 presumed victims, including some Serbs.
Only about a third of the ICTY’s suspected crime sites - 195 of 529 - have been investigated. The ICTY claims to have found evidence of "tampering" at some sites, suggesting that bodies have been moved elsewhere.
"I think \ did kill many more," said ICTY spokesman Paul Risley. "The reported figure that we have is quite accurate. That means 11,000 for the entire area. It’s just a question of whether we’ll ever find all the bodies."
If the remaining sites hold as many bodies on average as the sites already investigated, the final death toll could reach 5,700.
But some investigators say that’s not likely. The ICTY has already investigated the sites most likely to yield the best evidence against Serbian leaders.
Pathologist Emilio Perez Pujol, who headed a team of Spanish investigators in Kosovo, recently told The Times of London, "I calculate that the final figure of dead in Kosovo will be 2,500 at the most. This includes lots of strange deaths that can’t be blamed on anyone in particular."
Many of the dead were killed after NATO began bombing. Critics of the bombing wonder whether fewer people might have died if NATO had not intervened.
Alice Mahon, who chairs a committee on the Balkans as a member of the British Parliament, told The Times, "When you consider that 1,500 civilians or more were killed during the NATO bombing, you have to ask whether the intervention was justified."
The official reasons for NATO intervention were to stop ethnic cleansing, end the suffering of Kosovo Albanians and prevent a wider war. Officials also accused the Serbs of genocide and used estimates of dead and missing to support the charge.
Days before the first air strikes, U.S. lawmakers of both parties were using "genocide" to justify bombing.
"By the time the snows fall next winter, there will be genocide documented on a large scale in Kosovo," said Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del.
"History will judge us harshly if we do not take action to stop this rolling genocide," said Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb.
"What we have in Kosovo and what (we) had in Bosnia was genocide, and that's why I think we should intervene," said ex-Sen. Bob Dole, R-Kan.
When the first bombings sparked a Serb counteroffensive on the ground, State Department spokesman Jamie Rubin told reporters on March 29, "There are indications genocide is unfolding in Kosovo."
A week later, Defense Secretary William Cohen told reporters in Brussels, Belgium, the bombing was "a fight for justice over genocide."
Cohen said: "This no time to pause. We will reject any settlement that freezes the result of Milosevic’s genocide and rewards him for his brutality."
David Scheffer, U.S. ambassador for war crimes, ranked Kosovo among the top three genocides since 1950.
"What has occurred in Kosovo, with the possible exception of Rwanda in 1994 and Cambodia in 1975, is truly unprecedented with respect to the degree and ferocity and the short time span with which an assault on a civilian population has taken place," he said May 10.
In his March 24 address to the nation, President Clinton likened Kosovo to the Holocaust and Bosnia. Kosovo "is not war in the traditional sense," he said. "Imagine what would happen if we and our allies instead decided just to look the other way as these people were massacred on NATO’s doorstep."
During the war, Clinton accused Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic of "singling out whole peoples for destruction because of their ethnicity and faith."
After the war, Clinton claimed to have stopped genocide. Asked if NATO committed war crimes by bombing civilians, Clinton told reporters on June 25, "NATO did not commit war crimes. NATO stopped war crimes. NATO stopped deliberate, systematic efforts at ethnic cleansing and genocide."
ICTY’s Risley says the tribunal has found evidence of genocide. "You don’t need numbers to justify genocide," he said. "Genocide is a question of intent and organization and the efficiency of that organization."
But if numbers aren’t needed to justify the charge of genocide, NATO leaders apparently felt that numbers were needed to justify the bombing.
During the war, NATO officials issued rising estimates of Albanian victims, based on interviews with refugees. The estimates started at 3,200 in mid-April and rose to 6,000 the day the bombing ended, jumping to over 11,000 after NATO troops moved in.
Officials also stressed that 100,000 and later 225,000 Albanian men were missing. They noticed that most refugees were women and children and figured that more should have been men.
"You’re actually looking at the possibility of tens of thousands of Kosovars who not only are at risk, but also may actually have perished by this stage," war crimes ambassador Scheffer told Fox News on April 18. "We have upwards of about 100,000 men that we cannot account for. ... We have no idea where those men are now."
On May 10, State Department spokesman Rubin invoked the 100,000 figure to argue that the killing in Kosovo was probably far worse than reported.
"With respect to rapes and mass murder, we’re only just beginning to hear the reports," Rubin said. "We believe that this is just the beginning of the process of learning how many people died."
On May 16, Defense Secretary Cohen said on CBS’ "Face the Nation" that he had seen reports of 4,600 Albanians killed, but he added, "I suspect it’s far higher than that. ... We’ve now seen about 100,000 military-aged men missing. They may have been murdered."
By June 1, U.S. and NATO officials were claiming 225,000 men missing and 6,000 killed "in summary executions," according to NATO spokesman Jamie Shea.
Within days, senior British officials had pushed the number of dead to 10,000. "It’s very difficult to give an overall number, but what’s clear is that the picture is far worse than we thought," said David Gowan, Britain’s war crimes ambassador, in June.
The opposite seems now more likely. The 195 sites that yielded up to 2,108 bodies were supposed to have held 4,256 bodies.
Many early reports of "mass graves" appear now to have been exaggerated. The ICTY won’t say how many mass graves it has found. Too many "mass graves" have turned out like Ljubenic.
At Ljubenic, Italian troops first claimed to have found a grave with 350 bodies, "the largest suspected mass grave in Kosovo so far," according to the news service Agence France-Presse.
The next day, the same news service reported the Italians had actually found only five bodies at the site.